


Chicken Nuggets

by Likho



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - American Suburb, Attempt at Humor, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Code of conduct, Fanfiction, FreeBSD, Gen, Gun Violence, Internet, Internet Harassment, SJW, Slice of Life, Social Media, Swatting, Umbrella, Vigilantism, cancel culture, partially based on real life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23078542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likho/pseuds/Likho
Summary: The struggle of a male fanfiction writer.
Kudos: 1
Collections: /fanfic/ Collected Works





	1. Vigilante

I scratched my chin at my desk.

"You know," I said to myself, "It's probably best to never post this online."

The page for Archive Of Our Own was open, and my cursor hovered over the Post button. I took every precaution when I first made an account. A new e-mail account, a new alias, a new identity without the bounds and obligations of real life. No one to know who I was.

"It's fine. I proofread this ten times over."

Maybe it's embarrassing like I tried too hard; maybe it wasn't. Maybe I sullied an unspoken reputation in the community, but I didn't have a real reputation to fear for. I wanted to do it anyway. It was like my way of letting the world know how I thought about the series and fandom I follow. A niche old sci-fi series and in the fandom, I felt like the only one who didn't just want bondage rape porn of the main characters.

Everyone used to say "anything that goes on the internet stays there forever." Now, it's as though everyone's scrambling to archive what transient culture they could come across and preserve. Still, one click had an irreversible significance to me. My finger slowly teetered down, and the deed was done.

"Well," I said to myself. "Time to go to sleep."

The digital clock on my desktop read Saturday, 5:53 AM.

When I woke up in the late afternoon, I opened a web browser to browse social media. Usually, I expect zero notifications, zero messages, and a timeline full of dumb memes, watermarked image macros, and screenshots that I wouldn't recognize a day from now. I didn't have the personality to accrue hundreds of followers, so everyday was a slow day on there.

Apparently, social media is a hit thing in the modern internet life, but for what it is, it's lonely and overrated. If friends were closer than acquaintances, then acquaintances were closer than followers. Being online there was like being surrounded by stars in the night sky. Everyone was really out of reach.

Marking the page was a red circle that encapsulated the number one. One message--- something that almost never happened. I opened it with optimism.
    
    
      sjw1992 (Offline), one hour ago
        Do what I want or I will leak 
        your gay fanfiction to your 
        friends and family.
    

_Who the hell was this fucker._ I wrote in my response.
    
    
      Me, just now
        Piss off. I never did 
        anything to you.
    

The grey dot next to the username suddenly popped green. The guy was invisible the entire time.
    
    
      sjw1992 (Online), just now
        You ate at Chick-filé, you 
        closeted homophobic bigot. Do 
        as you're told or I leak your 
        gay fanfiction to your friends 
        and family.
    
    Me, just now
        Screw you. You don't know me.
    

"Fuck him," I said as I ate a chicken nugget. A white bag with red line art of a cartoon chicken was on my desk. "There's no way he knows where I live."

The next morning, I woke up and headed over to the bathroom. I filled a cup with water and squeezed toothpaste on to my brush.

"Honey," my mom walked over to the door, "Is there something you need to tell me and your father?"

Toothbrush in my mouth and an awkward vocal blob, I uttered, "Uh, no."

"Your father is having a harder time about it," she continued, "but I'll always support you no matter what."

"Ok, mom."

When I finished brushing, I walked over to my desktop for a quick check for messages I got online. I leaned to operate my mouse and keyboard, while not taking a seat.

My mail reader had a red dot meaning I received new e-mail messages, which I always took as good news. I clicked the icon, and the window took a longer time than usual to come on screen.

"God damn, this shit always hangs like this when I leave it on for a few days."

After a few seconds of no response, I could tell the program was just going to be slow until I restarted it, so I sat down. Not wanting to re-enter all my passwords for different mail accounts, I just waited.

Three e-mails.

The first was being @'d on social media.
    
    
      sjw1992, 5 hours ago
        @(You) is a chicken nugget 
        eating, sexist, white 
        supremacist, gamergate 
        supporting, FreeDSB using, gun 
        owning, Republican voting 
        homophobe.
    

"Who cares what these people think, but wow. How the hell did he get 521 retweets?"

The second was a notification from the social media service itself.
    
    
      Account Termination - Code of Conduct
     Violation
        Reason: Homophobia
    

"Bullshit." But I didn't care about that account anyway.

The third message was a notification from AO3.
    
    
      [AO3] Comment on your fanfic
    

I faced an 800+ word wall of text, but it made my day. The person never set an avatar and had a gender neutral username, but I always had a hunch it was a girl. She always left these massive comments, but she definitely paid attention to what I wrote.

"Alright," I said as I copied the text wall into a text editor and readied my fingers at the arrow and Enter keys, "Time to make sense of this."

By lunch hour, I finished drafting my response. I had broken up the wall of text, quoted each segment, and placed my response after.

"I think this response might bug out AO3 one way or another," I thought. It probably went way over the character limit. "I wish AO3 had a preview option for comments."

Then the doorbell rang and my buddy came over with two bags of Ins-And-Outs.

"It's lunch time, my dude," he said, "Charge your phone some day."

We ate at the dining table closest to the front door.

"Man," my friend said. "I proofread your shit and know your main characters are fags, but you didn't need to gay them up so hard."

"What."

I recalled the draft I gave him. It had slight cheesecake and almost-sexual fantasy in a dream sequence, but it was way better than having the character say "Hi, I'm gay" like an introduction from a bad video game. I wrote as a hobby, but at least I had better sense than to write things that way; I internally sighed.

"They're based on canon homo characters. I can't change that much," I said.

"Whatever man. I'll just ignore that chapter."

_Way to overreact to one page._

Then my dad walked in the room.

"Boy," he said. "I'm not telling you who you should love, but you should remember there are some things another man can't give you."

"What the hell are you talking about."

"Someone on the internet told me you wrote a gay love story is what."

"Oh." I chewed and finished my french fry. "That guy is lying about me."

"Well, nevermind then," my dad left the room.

At the end of the day, I was again at my computer. The site I was on was the kind of internet bulletin board system as though the year 2005 never ended. You could say its look was dated, dull, or boring, but the lack of trendy glass aesthetics, rounded rectangles, and Easter egg colors meant it didn't eat half of my desktop's memory.

"Everyone hordes over at social media, but I get way more responses from real people here," I said to myself.

The topic of discussion was anime and manga, and an hour after I made my post, I got a response.
    
    
      Anonymous, just a minute ago
    >>385512 (You)
    >yaoi
    Neck yourself you cock guzzling 
    degenerate.
    

I had to write my own.
    
    
      Anonymous (You), just now
    Fuck you too.
    

"Man," I sat back in my chair. "Fuck my life sometimes."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)  
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).


	2. Frozen Yogurt

"Not a cloud in the sky!" I said as I looked up.

The sun shone bright enough for my friend to bring her parasol today. We sat at the outdoor tables by the cafe with two cups of brightly colored frozen yogurt.

"Wait!" she said before I moved to take a scoop. "You gotta take a pic of our cups!"

"Right, I forgot."

I really didn't understand the trend. I took my phone out to take a picture. It clicked with the fake shutter of a real camera then I showed her the image it took.

"Gosh, you're hopeless," she said. "Your finger's blocking the lens again. Let me do it."

She then took out her phone, and in turn, it clicked.

"See?" she showed it to me. "I'll text it for both of us."

"Haha, yeah. You're a way better photographer than I am."

Even though we sat next to each other, with both of our phones out, we started silently browsing the web. Through scrolling text, just by the headlines and previews, the feeds were flooded by news of a gunman attacking a synagogue.

"Wow," I said. "That town isn't more than thirty miles away. Hell, the guy even has the same name as I do."

I scrolled down further and saw that SJW guy again with his tweet cited by the news.
    
    
      sjw1992, one hour ago
        The shooting was racially 
        motivated and carried out by a 
        white supremacist nazi 
        homophobe.
    

Just because the guy's popular, he's now a tipster for the news. I shook my head. If social media junkies of my generation were stereotyped to be tech addicts with short attention spans, hopelessly glued to the screen, then it said a lot about the journalists and reporters, who were over ten years older, that practically live on the feeds.

"That guy," I muttered, "and his fake ass robot followers."

"I don't get it either," she shrugged. "I never sign on there since there's no real conversation to be had."

* * *

"Bye!" she said from her car after she dropped me off at my house. "Let's study for next exam sometime."

"Yeah, later!" I waved off.

Not long after I stepped in from the door, I checked my phone for more news.

"The shooter carried out the attack with an AK-47," an article stated.

"Who do they think they're kidding," I commented as the photo of a pistol loaded.

I kicked off my shoes and went over to my desktop. Not long after, I heard the rush of cars, humming engines outside my house, and rude pounding on the front door. I jabbed my phone's screen as I walked back down to answer. The impatient knocker became increasingly forceful.

"God damn, what's the rush---"

The next thing I saw was the whole front door falling over like the frame was totaled. The puff of disturbed dust from flaking wood, and down flat to a loud, painful bang on marble floors that trembled the air. A team of armed dudes in Kevlar, like they came straight out of a video game, were at the porch. Each one had a big white 'SWAT' emblazoned on their pouchy vests.

"Freeze!" an officer shouted.

"What! I didn't do anything! It wasn't me!" I held out my phone. "See! This is where I was at the time of the shooting!"

I tried to show them the picture of frozen yogurt I took at the cafe, but my finger blocked a portion of the photo, and my friend's parasol looked enough like a rifle to the police.

"You're under arrest," he said.

The officer apprehended and pushed me out the door. Just as, I saw the others confiscating the lever action rifle in the house.

"Wait. Hey, that's my dad's Winchester!"

"You have the right to remain silent," the officer butted the back of my head with an MP5.

At the end of the day, I ended up in detainment. After an interrogation and obvious attempts to get me to admit to a crime I didn't do, I sat front of my dad from behind a glass pane.

"Boy," my dad's voice raised as he started to lecture. "What in the hell's name do you think you were doing today."

"I swear!" I reiterated my story. "I was at the cafe with Courtney this afternoon."

Like it was another interrogation, my dad didn't seem convinced.

It took a lot later for the department to find that the news got the whole story wrong. The sun sunk deep behind the horizon, and my ride home was silent. Not many would care about a nobody's front door, but it definitely was the reason behind the sour mood at the family dinner table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I checked if a city would have to pay for property damage in the event of a police raid. It turns out they don't.  
> <http://archive.is/DzDZG>

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)  
>  This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).


End file.
